A bipartisan group of six governors announced a coordinated effort to improve access to rapid coronavirus testing by circumventing the federal government and going straight to test manufacturers.
“With severe shortages and delays in testing and the federal administration attempting to cut funding for testing, the states are banding together to acquire millions of faster tests to help save lives and slow the spread of COVID-19,” said Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican.
Hogan, along with governors of Massachusetts, Ohio, Louisiana, Michigan, and Virginia (three Republicans and three Democrats), will team up with the Rockefeller Foundation to work with rapid antigen test manufacturers to scale up production. Point-of-care rapid antigen tests can detect coronavirus in patients in hospitals and clinics within 20 minutes.
The governors and partners at the Rockefeller Foundation are in talks with Becton Dickinson and Quidel, manufacturers of antigen tests that have already been authorized by the Food and Drug Administration, to purchase 500,000 tests per state, for a total of 3 million tests.
[Click here for complete coronavirus coverage]
“Rapid access to testing is crucial in our collective fight against COVID-19, which is why I am grateful to join these other governors in a collaborative effort to purchase testing supplies and help identify outbreaks more quickly, while improving the turnaround time for test results,” Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, said Tuesday.
The most commonly used diagnostic tests produce results in about seven days and as many as 10 to 15 days in some states, rendering tests useless as a means to prevent community transmission. The peak period of infectiousness lasts about a week, but widespread access to rapid antigen testing would identify cases while people are still infectious, mitigating the risk of spreading the virus in the time between getting tested and getting results.
“The states are leading America’s national response to COVID-19,” Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, a Democrat, said. “We are bringing together this bipartisan, multistate coalition to combine our purchasing power and get rapid testing supplies to our communities as quickly as possible.”
The reasons for delays in getting test results point to a bottleneck in national testing labs, according to the results of a new survey by researchers from Northeastern, Harvard, Northwestern, and Rutgers universities.
A solution to long wait times could be at-home diagnostic tests, which have yet to be approved by the FDA. People seeking portable tests or those taken at home could face barriers to getting quicker tests. Currently, the FDA requires a point-of-care test to achieve 80% accuracy to be granted approval, but it is not clear whether the FDA will apply that standard to portable tests.
